By Bill Steigerwald
Economic
journalist and author Garet Garrett (1878-1954) is largely forgotten by
history. Only libertarians and “Old Right” conservatives who still
believe in individual liberty, free markets, small government and a
foreign policy founded on noninterventionism keep Garrett’s name and
memory alive today.
Yet, as Seattle Times editorial writer and
columnist Bruce Ramsey details in his coming biography “Unsanctioned
Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right,” Garrett was a major
figure in the American media mainstream from the turn of the 20th
century to the 1950s.
A self-taught economist with a
fiction-writer’s style and a knack for clearly explaining how the real
world worked, Garrett was a vocal foe of the New Deal, socialism and
U.S. involvement in World War II. He was a financial writer or
editorialist at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and then
the Saturday Evening Post, arguably the most important middle-class
media outlet of the '30s and '40s.
A handful of his more than a
dozen books and novels -- some of which, like “The Wild Wheel” (about
Henry Ford), are in the public domain -- can be read online (links are
at Garrett’s Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garet_Garrett). And four Garrett books,
including “Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday
Evening Post, 1939-1942” and “Salvos Against the New Deal,” both of
which were edited by Ramsey, have been published by Caxton Press
(www.caxtonpress.com).
The small but freedom-friendly Idaho
company, which has been printing Ayn Rand's "Anthem" in hardback for
nearly 50 years, will bring out Ramsey’s biography of Garrett next
month. I talked to Ramsey by phone from Seattle.
Q: Why does Garrett deserve a biography?
A:
The reason I wanted to do a biography of him was that he stated some
ideas very clearly that I think are valuable ideas, even though they’ve
become unpopular -- or at least were unpopular for a long time. One of
those ideas is a justification for a limited-government, free-market
capitalist society that’s based on self-reliance. He directly ties
self-reliance in with the idea of freedom and individual liberty in a
way that is not done by a lot of modern writers.
Secondly, he
has an idea of foreign policy that is America-centered -- basically
from a time when America was a continental power or maybe a hemispheric
power but did not have pretensions to being a world power with a lot of
world responsibilities. He ties that in with the idea of a limited
government by saying that when you become a world empire, as he called
it, instead of a republic, you really can no longer have a limited
government and true individual freedom. You can’t have a limited
government because you need to have this strong presidential power –
the president who can take you to war on his decision is not bound very
much by a constitution. And if you become a world empire you need to
have a Congress that can levy all sorts of taxes on you and basically
determine domestic policy on how it influences the empire or the whole
world. So he made this argument for what he called a limited
constitutional government in a republican form that I think is more
consistent than the arguments made since then by conservatives. Also,
he ought to be remembered for his writing style. He was a colorful and
exact writer. As a writer I really admired him and much of the reason
why I wanted to write about him instead of somebody else was that I
liked his writing and I wanted to bring it back and show it off.
Q: Was he well-known?
A:
Yeah. He was the principal writer on The Saturday Evening Post from
1922 to 1942. He became friends with Herbert Hoover. He was a lifelong
friend of Bernard Baruch, who was a kind of Democratic senior
statesmen. In the circle of political types, he was well-known.
Q: Was he famous?
A:
Yes. He was known mostly as an economic writer. He wrote extensive on
things like foreign policy, on trade, on foreign debts from World War
I, the whole issue of repayment by the French and the British and the
Germans; he wrote a lot of pieces on the New Deal and he became famous
as attacking the New Deal; an then as World War II got closer he became
a spokesman for an America First point of view. He wanted to try to
stay out of the war but at the same time arm in case we had to go in it.
Q: What were his politics and who would he resemble today?
A:
In the recent campaign it would be (Texas Republican Congressman) Ron
Paul. That’s for sure. It was a very much Ron Paul-type foreign policy
and the emphasis on the Constitution. Even on the immigration issue,
he’s close to Ron Paul.
Q: What were his political beliefs?
A:
The closest word today would be “libertarian.” But he didn’t use that
word. He never labeled himself. But he was for a small government and
basically a pre-New Deal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution; for
sound money -- meaning gold-backed currency; for a
mind-your-own-business foreign policy; and for an internal free market
in the United States. Basically, he was opposed to the welfare state.
He wanted an independent, self-reliant America that would go its own
way and not be all bound up in obligations to other countries to modify
and do what they wanted to do.
Q: What are his least-likable beliefs – things that you might find embarrassing yourself?
A:
He expressed at the end of his life that he thought that America had
let in too many immigrants in the early 20th century and basically that
they had brought in a lot of European ideas – particularly socialism
and internationalism --that had watered down the kind of opinions that
America held when he was young. In his last book, he had the line “The
Copper Woman had done her work.” Another belief he had was that he was
sometimes was a protectionist. He had an interesting argument for it.
He wasn’t averse to tariffs. I’m basically a free-trader. I don’t think
tariffs make a lot of sense, so we’re different there. He credited
tariffs for crating the American steel industry and the steel rail
industry and the steel wire industry and some other things in the 19th
century. So he thought it was OK to have a tariff. He didn’t want the
government to manage who traded with whom though.
Q: What made him different or better than the other anti-New Dealers?
A:
Well, some of the others focused on personality -- the personality of
Roosevelt or people around him like Rexford Tugwell or the zany Henry
Wallace over at the Agriculture Department. Garrett really was focusing
on the economic essence of what the New Deal was trying to do. So he
really homed in on the central idea of the thing -- one of which was to
try to restore the previous price structure by pushing prices of things
up. Garrett thought it was insane to do that in a depression -- to go
around and try to push prices up -- because it made it harder for
anybody to put together an enterprise and make any money, because they
had to pay more for inputs, labor, whatever. It just wasn’t the way we
ever got out of a depression before. And another thing some of the
Roosevelt people had was this vision of a more stable society – that
society under capitalism was too erratic and they wanted more of a
steady-state society. Garrett thought that was terrible because there
would be no progress in it.
Q: What would he think of the size and scope of the federal government today?
A:
He’d say it was way too big, because he would have the government be
more like the size it was about a century ago -- more like 5 or 6 or 7
percent of GDP instead of 20 percent. He’d still have an Army and a
Navy and some of the traditional functions, but he was not in favor of
the Social Security program and he didn’t even envision Medicaid,
Medicare and all the stuff that costs all the money now – or military
bases in 130 countries around the world.
Q: Why should we care about Garet Garrett today?
A:
Well, because we are facing some of these same questions today. They’re
perennial questions about the size and power of the federal government
and just what it undertakes to do and how much control it has over our
lives; secondly, because he linked these two things -- the size and
power of constitutional government in the domestic sphere on one hand
and foreign policy.
He was a man of the right. He was in those
days essentially a conservative, and I think the right in America needs
to rediscover somebody like this because they have gotten all seduced
by a kind of a nationalist, rah-rah-rah for our side (mentality) and
they don’t question the bigger questions -- what the troops are
deployed for, what’s the purpose of it, whether it makes any sense and
whether it’s really in our interest.
Actually, the American
right got sidetracked by the Cold War. Before the Cold War, we had an
attitude that was more like Garrett’s and then you have four decades of
struggling against the Communists. And, of course, the right wasn’t
going to like the Communists, and they were going to disregard
Garrett’s misgivings about it and go have this big battle to contain
the Communists. But fighting communism changed the right. It made the
right into the pro-military party -- the feeling that it was a good
thing to have bases in Korea and Germany and Diego Garcia and who knows
where.
I think it’s mistaken. You actually have more freedom
as a free country if your government is smaller and you stay out of
other people’s problems and Garrett was someone who expressed that very
clearly.
A Garet Garrett Sampler
Republic or empire?
Garet Garrett biographer Bruce Ramsey chose this passage for the Trib from Garrett's 1952 book, "Rise of Empire":
The
history of a Republic is its own history. Its past does not contain its
future, like a seed. A Republic may change its course, or reverse it,
and that will be its own business. But the history of Empire is world
history and belongs to many people.
A Republic is not obliged to
act upon the world, either to change it or instruct it. Empire, on the
other hand, must put forth its power.
What is it that now obliges the American people to act upon the world? …
It is not only our security that we are thinking of -- our collective security. Beyond that is a greater thought.
It is our turn.
Our turn to do what?
Our turn to assume the responsibilities of moral leadership in the world.
Our
turn to maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil
everywhere -- in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and
Pacific, by air and by sea. …
It is our turn to keep the peace of the world. …
But
this is the language of Empire. The Roman Empire never doubted that it
was the defender of civilization. Its good intentions were peace, law
and order. The Spanish Empire added salvation. The British Empire added
the noble myth of the white man’s burden. We have added freedom and
democracy. Yet the more that may be added to it the more it is the same
language still. A language of power.
Other quotes from Garet Garrett
Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.
--
Loyalty of the law-making power to the executive power was one of the dangers the political fathers foretold.
--
There
are many aspects of government. The one least considered is what may be
called the biological aspect, in which government is like an organism
with such an instinct for growth and self-expression that if let alone
it is bound to destroy human freedom – not that it might wish to do so
but that it could not in nature do less. No government ever wants less
government ... that is, less of itself. No government ever surrenders
power, even its emergency powers -- not really. It may mean to
surrender them, but on the first new occasion it will take them all
back.
A link to a chapter of Garrett's 1953 book, "The People's Pottage":
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0693e.asp
Bill
Steigerwald is a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. E-mail
Bill at steigerwald@caglecartoons.com. ©Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, All
Rights Reserved.
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